Prael & Capslocked AMA

Hi. Prael here. Welcome to TAVERN TALK, and we will be answering the questions you already submitted about writing, smut, creative process, fandom, and whatever else you decided it was appropriate to ask two people who spend this much time inventing reasons for idols to have sex.

Between us, we have written several hundred thousand words. This post spent several months as a thing we were definitely going to do, then a source of low-grade mutual guilt, and has finally reached publication because the shame of not doing it exceeded the inconvenience of doing it.

Smooches, it’s me: capslocked. The questions were thoughtful, technical, personal, incriminating, and occasionally none of the above. Here are our answers.

@Box asks having been so long in the game, how do you keep finding fresh new ideas to write about?

Uh, I don’t think I do? 

I think part of continuing to find “new” ideas is remembering that I am the only person reading my work in the exact order it was written, with a complete forensic memory of every dynamic, image, joke, and sexual situation I have already used. 

We’re all guilty of feeling like we’re writing the same thing over and over, but I also think that’s fine. 

It’s not like most readers are maintaining capslocked or prael continuity bibles. 

They skip around. They find one fic and read & reread it obsessively. After enough time, “finding fresh ideas” becomes less like divine inspiration and more like laundering the same five fixations through increasingly elaborate premises.

While I do try to sprinkle in some variety in settings or in positions or personalities, I don’t see the repetition as a bad thing per se. Sure, I can write 10 car sex fics, but if they’re different idols, not everyone will read them all, so they will likely never notice the repetition as I do. 

I feel that as long as I’m not writing the same thing for the same idol as I have done previously, it’s always going to feel ‘fresh enough’ to almost everyone.

I mean guys, seriously, I like writing girls in small dresses and pretty accessories getting their pussy stuffed until they start drooling over a bathroom/kitchen sink.

At some point you stop calling that a creative limitation and start calling it thematic consistency.

@Octa9on - what are your processes for turning a little idea into a fully realized fic?

For me it’s all about finding a start point. I always say that my writing is quite momentum-based, so I find myself writing and re-writing the opening until I get one that sticks. Once that happens I can usually extrapolate from there and barrel towards the idea that started it all using the momentum I have gathered. Genuinely, I just need to get the ball rolling and then it’s go time. Sometimes it can take several tries, sometimes I give up, and that’s okay.

Usually it starts with one smut idea that is so specific and so hot to me that it begins to feel less like inspiration and more like a small administrative emergency.

Then I write towards it, badly - and several times.

Eventually I stop pretending these attempts are separate failures and begin harvesting them for parts. The opening from one, the dynamic from another, the image that survived all three, maybe a sentence I have been carrying around like stolen property. At some point the failed versions collapse into a single fic that finally approaches the thing I originally saw in my head.

So the process is less “expand a small idea into a finished story” and more “produce several incorrect answers until they can be dismantled into the correct one.”

Shin asks: How do you deal with writer’s block or mental block? Any advice for other writers on how to deal with it “better,” if that’s even a thing?

My take on this is rather simplistic, I think. I treat writing casually, and I never force myself to write unless I want to.

Yeah, I have developed no meaningful discipline whatsoever.

I prefer to say that I wait until inspiration finds me instead of chasing it. Then, when it does, I ride the wave the whole way to the destination—often finishing the core of a fic in one or two sittings.

Because of that, I don’t often experience writer’s block in the traditional sense. If I do hit a block, I’m perfectly happy to put the fic down and return the next day.

Or just not at all.

Or just not at all.

I’m similar, although for me writing usually requires a mild and probably undiagnosable act of possession. I have to be able to put the fic on - to inhabit its voice, its temperature, and especially the persona of whoever is carrying the scene.

If the character is vain, evasive, cruel, funny, lovesick, or catastrophically self-assured, I need to borrow that posture for a while and see the room through it.

I think that is what I would simply call being inspired.

You make it sound less medically concerning.

When I can find that voice, the writing tends to produce its own momentum. When I cannot, no amount of staring at the document or responsibly scheduling fifteen-minute writing sprints is going to manufacture the missing frequency.

The character remains outside me, politely declining to participate, and every sentence sounds like an employee covering someone else’s shift.

Which is why I don’t force it. I know some people find routines, schedules, and daily word counts helpful, but I think making myself write when I don’t want to would only make me enjoy it less.

And once you begin treating a hobby like an obligation, writer’s block becomes indistinguishable from simply not wanting to go to work.

Exactly. So I put it down and do something else until I feel like coming back.

Sometimes I find the voice later. Sometimes changing the point of view, setting, or opening lets me enter through another door. A scene might not work from the perspective I originally chose, or the fic might begin fifty paragraphs after the place I kept insisting it had to begin.

I suppose that is the closest thing here to practical advice.

Yes: before deciding the entire idea is broken, try changing the entrance.

But I also don’t think every idea needs to be rescued. A premise can be good and still fail to hold your interest.

Nor is every idea owed completion. Shelving something is not necessarily a failure. Sometimes the part that excited you has already taught you whatever it had to teach, and finishing the rest would only be clerical work.

I’m not sure anyone can fish much advice out of my answer beyond “wait until you feel like writing,” which may not be especially helpful.

I think it is helpful to hear that you are allowed to stop fighting yourself. There is a tendency to treat writer’s block as a character defect that must be overcome through superior discipline. Sometimes you are blocked because the scene is wrong. Sometimes the voice has disappeared. Sometimes you are tired. Sometimes you simply do not want to write.

And sometimes taking a six-month break is pretty nice too. You get to come back refreshed.

Unfortunately that’s just my release schedule.

@Azelfty asks: given that you two have been quite active as writers for a while, and you must have seen many new writers come into the scene after you, what do you look out for in new author debuts? What tells you that “yeah they’re gonna do great in the future” and what advice would you give to new authors who are unsure about how to start or how to continue with writing kfics/ksmut/fics in general? 

Well, nowadays my answer is that I look for it not to be AI, which is sad but unfortunately true. Let’s assume we get past that hurdle; I’m definitely a style-over-substance guy. Now that doesn’t mean I'm looking for fics to be completely devoid of any substance, but what it does mean is that you can take the most basic of premises, and as long as you, the narrator - the author - have something to say about it, then it is instantly elevated. 

I’m not necessarily looking for polish when I read someone new. Plenty of technically clean debuts are forgettable in the same way a very expensive hotel room can be forgettable: everything is where it should be, nothing is actively wrong, and ten minutes after leaving you could not tell anyone what the carpet looked like.

The better signal, I think, is that the writer already has taste - which is not the same thing as skill, exactly, but some private instinct about what they find funny or sexy or romantic or obscene or emotionally interesting; some evidence that they are not merely reproducing the general idea of what a fic is supposed to sound like, but are actually selecting things. Chosen because the author found it irresistible or embarrassing or beautiful or specifically hot. Without that, it is writing without preference, which is a little like watching someone eat who has no sense of taste.

You need to have a voice. You need to let your personality shine through into the work. That’s enough to make anything interesting, even if it’s unpolished nonsense. It’s interesting, unpolished nonsense.

Anyone can pull up a document and tell me: